Some pharmaceuticals, especially drugs used in chemotherapy, are extremely dangerous to handle. In their concentrated form many of these pharmaceuticals can cause burns on the skin requiring skin grafts to heal if even a drop is inadvertently splashed onto the skin of a health care worker.
These dangerous pharmaceuticals are typically administered after being withdrawn from a vial using a syringe and then injected from the syringe into an I.V. bag for the intravenous administration of the drug in a diluted form. It is during this transfer process that the health care worker is most likely to be exposed to the dangerous pharmaceutical. The necessary handling and manual manipulation of the syringe and vial can result in the vial being dropped and broken, causing this dangerous material to spray or splash unpredictably. In addition to being dangerous, a broken vial can result in the loss of pharmaceutical which is expensive or in limited supply, or both.